ἐλθέμεν is an Aeolic infinitive form (Chantraine 1988, GH I §237). Although the language of Homer is primarily Ionic in nature, Aeolic dialect forms make up a considerable percentage of Homeric diction. Before oral composition-in-performance and dialect diffusion were well understood, a considerable amount of scholarly effort was devoted to finding an explanation for the mix of dialects (see MHV 326–327). In the 1880s August Fick ignited Homeric scholarship by proposing that the Iliad was composed in Aeolic Greek and later translated by Ionic singers into their own dialect, and he even went so far as to produce editions of the Iliad (1886) and Odyssey (1883) with the Aeolic dialect restored everywhere possible. Approximately fifty years later Milman Parry theorized that the oral tradition had passed through several distinct historical phases, one of which was an Aeolic phase. He argued that just as singers in the Homeric tradition would have naturally replaced older forms with more current ones, where meter and other strongly felt patterns allowed, but retained them where they did not, so also did Ionic singers, inheriting an Aeolic epic song tradition, replace Aeolic forms everywhere possible, but retained them where the formulas could not easily be adapted in performance. (See especially MHV, and on the theory of an Aeolic phase, see also Palmer 1962, Hoekstra 1965, Janko 1982, and West 1988.) So here the change of ἐλθέμεν to ἐλθεῖν (which is attested at 10.56 and various other places in the Iliad) would result in a spondee in the fifth foot (generally avoided in Homer, though not impossible). More recently an alternative theory has been proposed, namely, that Aeolic and Ionic epic traditions coexisted after the end of Bronze Age, but the Aeolic tradition was eventually assimilated into and eclipsed by the Ionic tradition in Asia Minor. (On this complex question see the overview in Horrocks 1997.) In any case, certainly an Aeolic tradition of epic poetry did flourish at one time, as is evidenced by such poems as Sappho 44 (on which see West 1973:191, Nagy 1974:134–39, Horrocks 1997:200, and Dué 2002:59).